The Stranger's Child Part 34

'You must know a lot of people whose lives have been written.'

'Yes, or they turn up in someone else's, you know.'

'Like you, yourself, indeed, Mummy!' said Wilfrid.

'The thing is, they all get it wrong.' She'd now got back into that irritable mood that she clearly enjoyed.

'The best ones don't, perhaps,' said Paul.

'They take against people,' said Daphne, 'or someone they talk to bears a grudge, and tells them things that aren't right. And they put it all in as if it was gospel!' This was obviously meant as a warning, but was said as if it had completely slipped her mind that he was writing a biography himself. She glowed, chin tucked in, eyes turned on him but, as he had to remind himself, barely seeing him; though a tremor of contact seemed to pa.s.s between them through the quivering heat of the electric fire.

'Well . . . !' Paul paused respectfully. The first rush of the gin seemed to present him with a view of all the things it was in his grasp to ask her, the numerous doubts and rumours and aspersions he had heard, about her and her family. Did she have any idea what had gone on between George and Cecil, for instance? Did Wilfrid himself know the theory that his sister was Cecil's child? He had to tread carefully, but he saw more clearly than ever that the writer of a life didn't only write about the past, and that the secrets he dealt in might have all kinds of consequences in other lives, in years to come. With Wilfrid present, knocking back an orange squash, he could hardly say or ask anything intimate; though Daphne too was more open and cheerful after a drink it might have been worth trying.

Still, something warned Paul not to accept a second gin, and at seven o'clock he asked if he could call a taxi. Daphne smiled firmly at this, and Wilfrid said he'd be happy to drive him into Worcester in the Renault.

'I really don't want to make you turn out at night,' Paul said, his courteous demurral covering a natural nervousness about the car as well as the driver.

'Oh, I like to take her out for a spin,' said Wilfrid, so that for a moment Paul thought Daphne was coming too. 'It's not good for her just to . . . stand in the drive from one week to the next.'

Daphne stood up, and hanging on to the large oak chest got across the room with a new air of warmth and enthusiasm. 'Where do you live?' she said, almost as if thinking of a return visit.

'I live in Tooting Graveney.'

'Oh, yes . . . Is that near Oxford?'

'Not really, no . . . It's near Streatham.'

'Streatham, oh!' even this seemed rather a lark.

They now shook hands. 'Well, thank you so much.' It was perhaps a moment to call her Daphne, but he held off till their second session. 'I'll see you tomorrow, same time.'

Paul wondered afterwards if it was a true misunderstanding or a bit of Dudleyesque fooling. She halted by the door into the hall, head c.o.c.ked in confusion. 'Oh, are you coming back?' she said.

'Oh . . . well' Paul gasped. 'I think that was . . . what we agreed!' He'd got nothing out of her today, but was resignedly treating it as a warm-up for the real explorations the following afternoon.

'What are we doing tomorrow, Wilfrid?'

'I should be surprised if we were doing anything very much,' said Wilfrid, in a way that made Paul wonder whether all his patient simplicities weren't perhaps a very cool kind of sarcasm.

In the Renault it was rather as if a child drove an adult, both of them pretending that it wasn't worrying or surprising. It emerged that the dip-switch was broken, so that they had either to crawl along on side-lights, the hedges looming dimly above them, or to be flashed at by on-coming motorists blinded by the headlights on full beam. Wilfrid coped with both things with his usual whimsical patience. Paul didn't want to distract him, but when they got on to the main road he said, 'I hope I'm not tiring your mother.'

'I think she's enjoying it,' Wilfrid said; and with a glance in the mirror, as if to check she wasn't there, 'She likes telling a story.'

Paul very much wished she would tell him a story. He said, 'I'm afraid it was all so long ago.'

'There are things she won't talk about . . . I hope we can trust you on that,' said Wilfrid, with an unexpected note of solidarity after his earlier grumbling about her.

'Well . . .' Paul was torn between the discretion just requested of him and the wish to ask Wilfrid what he was talking about. 'I obviously don't want to say anything that would upset her or any of the family.' Might Wilfrid himself tell him things? Paul had no idea what he was capable of, mentally. He clearly loved his mother and more or less hated his father, but he might not be the ally Paul needed for his further prying into the dealings of the Sawles and Valances. If Corinna was really Cecil's daughter, then Dudley's shocking coolness towards her might have some deeper cause.

'I don't think you're married, are you?' Wilfrid asked, peering forward over the wheel into the muddled glare on the edge of Worcester.

'No, I'm not . . .'

'No, Mother thought not.'

'Ah, yes . . . well, hmm.'

'Poor old Worcester,' said Wilfrid a minute later, as the car swerved through a sort of urban motorway right next to the Cathedral; up above, too close to see properly, reared floodlit masonry, the great Gothic tower. 'How could they have butchered the old place like this?' Paul heard this as a catch-phrase, saw mother and son on their trips into town coming out with it each time. 'Right next to the Cathedral,' said Wilfrid, craning out to encourage Paul to do the same, while the car wandered over into the fast lane there was a ma.s.sive blast on a horn, a lit truck as tall as the tower screeching behind them, then thundering past.

Turning left, and then pa.s.sing staunchly through a No Entry sign, they travelled the length of a one-way street in the wrong direction, Wilfrid mildly offended by the rudeness of on-coming drivers, turned another corner, and there they were outside the front door of the Feathers. 'Amazing,' said Paul.

'I know this old town backwards,' said Wilfrid.

'Well, I'll see you tomorrow,' said Paul, opening the door.

'Shall I pick you up?' said Wilfrid, with just a hint of breathlessness, Paul thought, a glimpse of excitement at having this visitor in their lives. But Paul insisted he was perfectly happy to get a Cathedral. He stood and watched as Wilfrid drove off into the night.

9.

Daphne followed her regime as usual that evening there was the hot milk, and then the tiny gla.s.s of cherry brandy, to take the sickening sleepy taste away. Her sleeping pill itself was swallowed with the last cooled inch of the milk, and after that a pleasant certainty that the day was wound up suffused her, well before the physical surrender to temazepam. Tonight the cherry brandy seemed to celebrate the fact. She said, 'What time is he coming back?' just to have it confirmed that it wasn't till after lunch. Wilfrid started on the film that followed the News, but her macular thing made the telly both boring and upsetting. So she left him to it, going out of the room with a pa.s.sing pat at his arm or shoulder, and made her way to the other end (in so far as Olga had another end) of the house.

Book at Bedtime this week was the autobiography of a woman she couldn't remember her name, or what exactly she'd been up to in Kenya last night when sleep had come with just enough warning for her to switch off the radio and the bedside light. On the dressing-table, an awful cheap white and gilt thing, stood the photographs she never really looked at, but she peered at them now, in her sidelong way, as she smeared on her face cream. Their interest seemed enhanced after the visit from the young man, and she was glad he hadn't seen them. The one of her with Corinna and Wilfrid by the fishpond at Corley was her favourite so small but clear: she turned it to the light with a creamy thumb. Who had taken it, she wondered? . . . The photo, known by heart, was the proof of an occasion she couldn't remember at all. The Beaton photo of Revel in uniform was, pleasingly, almost famous: other portraits from the same session had appeared in books, one of them in her own book, but this exact photograph, with its momentary drop of the pose, the mischievous tongue-tip on the upper lip, was hers alone. A pictorial virtue, of the kind that Revel himself had taught her to understand, had been made of the hideous great-coat. His lean head and fresh-cropped poll were framed by the upturned collar he looked like some immensely wicked schoolboy, though she knew if you looked closely you could see the fine lines round the eyes and the mouth that Beaton had touched out in the published images.

She woke in the dark out of dreams of her own mother, very nearly a nightmare; it was wartime and she was searching for her, going in and out of shops and cafes asking if anyone had seen her. Daphne never remembered her dreams, but even so she felt sure she had never dreamt about her mother before she was a novelty, an intruder! It was bracing, disconcerting, amusing even, once she had felt for the switch at the neck of the lamp, and squinted at the time, and had a small drink of water. Freda had died in 1940, so the Blitz setting made almost too much sense. And no doubt talking to the young man, trying to cope with all his silly and rather unpleasant questions, had brought her back. In talking, she had only touched on her mother, whose actual presence in 1913 she could no longer see at all, but that must have been enough to set the old girl going, as if greedy for more attention. Daphne kept the light on for a while longer, with a barely conscious sense that in childhood she would have done the same, longing for her mother but too proud to call for her.

In the dark again she found she was at the tipping-point, relief at the closing-down of yesterday was ebbing irrecoverably, and already the dread of tomorrow (which of course was already today) was thickening like regret around her heart. Why on earth had she said he could come back? Why had she let him come at all, after that idiotic condescending piece about her book in the Listener, or perhaps the New Statesman? He was only pretending to be a friend something no interviewer, probably, had ever been. Paul Bryant . . . he was like some little wire-haired ratter, with his long nose and his tweed jacket and his b.l.o.o.d.y-minded way of going at things. Daphne turned over in a spasm of confused annoyance, at him and at herself. She didn't know what was worse, the genial vague questions or the stern particular ones. He called him Cecil all the time, not as if he'd known him, exactly, but as if he could help him. 'What was Cecil like?' what a stupid question . . . 'When you say in your book he made love to you, what happened exactly?' She'd said 'Pa.s.s!' to that one, rather good, as if she were on Mastermind. She thought tomorrow she would just say 'Pa.s.s!' to everything.

And Robin, too there was a good deal of Robin this and that. She couldn't think what he meant by sending him, recommending him; though then a shadowy understanding, grim, frivolous, almost wordless the old thing that she didn't even picture turned over and after a minute lay down again at the side of her mind. As well as which, there was something else, which maybe was actually a blessing in its way, that for quite long stretches of the conversation young Paul Bryant had clearly not been listening to a word she said. He thought she couldn't see him at all, reading something while she talked; then he hurried her along, or he came in suddenly with some completely irrelevant other thing. Maybe he thought he knew all the answers already, but in that case why ask questions? Of course he had it all on his blasted tape-recorder, but that didn't exempt him from the normal courtesies. She thought in the morning she would ring up Robin at the office and give him a very hard time about it.

She turned over once more and settled with a spasm of self-righteousness; and was on the very edge of sleep again when the obvious idea that she could put Paul Bryant off altogether made her suddenly and beautifully alert. Wilfrid had taken him back to the Feathers, that fearful dump she was glad he was staying there. He seemed to think it was quite the thing! Only two stars, he'd said, but very comfortable . . . She'd get her son to ring up for her first thing in the morning. She lay there, half-plotting, half-drowsing, imagining it, the afternoon without him, freedom tinged, but not irreparably spoilt, by guilt. She was pretty sure she had said he could come twice, and besides he had come from London specially. But why should she be put upon, at the age of eighty-three? She wasn't at all well, she was having a lot of trouble with her eyes . . . She really mustn't worry about it. He'd been through all Cecil's letters to her, which he claimed were manipulative and self-pitying perfectly true, perhaps, but then what more did he want from her? He was asking for memories, too young himself to know that memories were only memories of memories. It was diamond-rare to remember something fresh. And she felt that if she did, Paul Bryant was hardly the person she would want to share it with.

Daphne was supposed to have a good memory, and this reputation sustained her uneasily in face of the thousands of things she couldn't remember. People had been amazed by what she'd dredged up for her book, but much of it, as she'd nearly admitted to Paul Bryant, was not fiction, which one really mustn't do about actual people, but a sort of poetical reconstruction. The fact was that all the interesting and decisive things in her adult life had happened when she was more or less tight: she had little recall of anything that occurred after about 6.45, and the blur of the evenings, for the past sixty years and more, had leaked into the days as well. Her first problem, in doing her book, had been to recall what anyone said; in fact she had made up all the conversations, based (if one was strictly truthful) on odd words the person almost certainly had said, and within about five, or at the outside ten, years of the incident recorded. Was this just her failing? Now and then people gave her the most astonis.h.i.+ng reports of what she had said, drolleries they would never forget, and rather gratifying to her though perhaps these should be treated with comparable suspicion? Sometimes she knew for sure that they were mixing her up with someone else. She had probably taken too long with her memoirs. Basil had encouraged her, told her quite freely to write all about Revel, and Dudley before him, 'significant figures!' he'd said, self-mockingly. But it had taken thirty years to bring it off, over which time she'd naturally forgotten a great deal that she'd known very well when she started out. If she'd kept a diary it would have been different, but she never had, and her experience as a memoirist, if typical, couldn't help but throw the most worrying light over half the memoirs that were written. Certain of her incidents were tied indubitably to Berks.h.i.+re or Chelsea, but a host of others took place against a general-purpose scenery, as in some repertory theatre, of drinks-tray and mirrors and chintz-covered sofas, blending all social life into one staggeringly extended run.

She felt something similar, but worse in a way, about hundreds and hundreds of books she'd read, novels, biographies, occasional books about music and art she could remember nothing about them at all, so that it seemed rather pointless even to say that she had read them; such claims were a thing people set great store by but she hardly supposed they recalled any more than she did. Sometimes a book persisted as a coloured shadow at the edge of sight, as vague and unrecapturable as something seen in the rain from a pa.s.sing vehicle: looked at directly it vanished altogether. Sometimes there were atmospheres, even the rudiments of a scene: a man in an office looking over Regent's Park, rain in the streets outside a little blurred etching of a situation she would never, could never, trace back to its source in a novel she had read some time, she thought, in the past thirty years.

She woke to find grey light spreading above the curtains, and made a wary a.s.sessment of the time. These early wakings were anxious countings of loss and gain was it late enough not to mind being woken? Might it still be early enough to lay a presentable claim on more sleep? With the coming on of spring one was more defenceless. Five-fifty: not too bad. And as soon as she wondered about whether she had to go to the loo she found she did. Out of bed, into slippers, dressing-gown on over pyjamas she was glad she couldn't see herself in the mirror as more than a blurred bundle. Light on, out past Wilfrid's door, the click of the loose parquet, but it wouldn't wake him. He had the large capacity for sleep of a child. She had a picture, not much changed in fifty years, of his head on the pillow, and nothing ever happening to him, at least that she knew of. And now there was this Birgit, with her shadowy plans. Poor Wilfrid was so naive that he couldn't see the woman for the fortune-hunter she was and what a fortune! . . . Daphne tutted as she groped her way through the shadowy cupboard in which the wash-basin and lavatory were like surreal intrusions in a mountain of rubbish.

In the morning, bright and early, Lady Caroline Messent rang to invite her to tea. The phone at Olga was fixed to the kitchen wall, Caroline perhaps having pictured Olga herself as habitually in that room, and standing more or less to attention when she spoke to her. 'I can't, my dear,' said Daphne, 'I've got this young man coming back.'

'Oh, do put him off,' said Caroline in her droll scurry of a voice. 'Who is he?'

'He's called he's interrogating me, I'm like a prisoner in my own home.'

'Darling . . .' said Caroline, allowing that for the present at least it was Daphne's home. 'I wouldn't stand for it. Is he from the gas board?'

'Oh, much worse.' Daphne steadied herself against the worktop which she could dimly see was a dangerous muddle of dirty dishes, half-empty bottles and pill-packets. 'He turned up yesterday he's like the Kleeneze man.'

'You mean hawking?'

'He says I met him at Corinna and Leslie's, but I have absolutely no recollection of it.'

'Oh, I see . . .' said Caroline, as if now siding slightly with the intruder. 'But what does he want?'

Daphne sighed heavily. 's.m.u.t, essentially.'

's.m.u.t?'

'He's trying to write a book about Cecil.'

'Cecil? Oh, Valance, you mean? Yes, I see.'

'You know, I've already written all about it.'

Caroline paused. 'I suppose it was only a matter of time,' she said.

'Hmm? I don't know what he's got into his head. He's insinuating, if you know what I mean. He's more or less saying that I didn't come clean in some way in my book.'

'No, that must be awfully annoying.'

'Well, less awfully, more b.l.o.o.d.y, actually, as Alfred, Lord Tennyson said to my father.'

'So funny, that,' said Caroline.

'Really Cecil means nothing to me I was potty about him for five minutes sixty years ago. The significant thing about Cecil, as far as I'm concerned,' said Daphne, half-hearing herself go on, 'is that he led to Dud, and the children, and all the grown-up part of my life, which naturally he had no part in himself!'

'Well, tell that to your Kleeneze man, darling,' said Caroline, evidently thinking Daphne protested too much.

'I suppose I should.' And she saw there was a little shameful reluctance to do so, and thus reduce even further her interest for the young man. It struck her suddenly that Caroline must already know him. 'I'm fairly sure he was at your launch party,' she said. 'Paul Bryant.'

'You don't mean the young man from . . . was it Canterbury . . . one of the red-bricks.'

'He might be, I suppose. He used to work in the bank with Leslie.'

'Ah, no. But there certainly was a clever young man, you're quite right, doing something on Cecil's poetry.'

'No, I know who you mean, I can't remember his name. I've dealt with him already. This is another young man.'

'Mm, my dear, it's obviously Cecil's moment,' said Caroline.

10.

Next morning Paul sat in his hotel room, going over his notes, with a coffee tray beside him: the pitted metal pot with the untouchable handle, the lipsticked cup, the bowl of white sugar in soft paper tubes which he emptied serially into the three strong cupfuls he took, getting quickly excited and overheated. On a plate with a doily were five biscuits, and though he'd only just had breakfast he ate them all, the types so familiar the Bourbon, the sugared Nice, the rebarbative ginger-nut, popped in whole that he was touched for a moment by a sense of the inseparable poverty and consistency of English life, as crystallized in the Peek Frean a.s.sortment box. He sat back in his chair as he munched and levelled a look at his own industrious jaw movements in the mirror; and a less comfortable sensation came over him. The fact was he had never watched himself eating, and was astonished at his forceful, rodent-like look, the odd sag of his neck on one side as he chewed, the working flicker of his temples. This must be what his company was like to others, what Karen faced each night over dinner, and the realization made him run down pensively, stop chewing mid-biscuit and then start up again as if to catch himself unawares. He wasn't at all sure he would want to confide his own secrets to such a man.

He was writing up further aspects of yesterday's meeting in his diary a book in which the spa.r.s.e record of his own life was now largely replaced by the ramifying details of others'. Now and then he played back the tape, more for the feel of it than because he believed he would get much out of it. There was a fair amount he had forgotten, but he knew too that there were spells in any interview when he didn't listen to the other person: it was partly the perennial self-consciousness, his sense of playing a role laughing, sighing, sadly nodding eclipsing any likelihood of taking in whatever was being said; and it was partly some colder sense that the interviewee was evasive or repet.i.tive, deliberately boring him and wasting his time. It was appalling what they couldn't remember, and with his primary witnesses, all in their eighties, he had a view of them stuck in a rut, or a wheel, doggedly chasing the same few time-smoothed memories along with their nose and their paws. When he'd gone through 'The Hammock' with Daphne, hoping to goad her memory, she had carried on using the same words and phrases as she had in her book, and probably had for fifty years before that. In her book she'd made such a thing of this youthful romance, and he could see that the thing that she'd made had replaced the now remote original experience, and couldn't usefully be interrogated for any further unrevealed details. She didn't actually seem at all interested in Cecil, much less in the chance Paul was giving her, at the end of her life, to put things straight. He laughed warily when he thought of her little snub, as he was leaving ('Are you coming back?'); but in a way it simply made him more determined.

George's theory about Corinna, if true, threw a very strange light on to Dudley. Perhaps today he should try to get her on to the subject of her first marriage, and trick her, almost, into some revelation. George had said such marriages happened a great deal at that time. Obviously Paul would have to track down Corinna's birth certificate. How complicit was Dudley in the whole thing? It was a most peculiar love triangle. In Black Flowers Dudley coped with his brother's affairs in his customary ramblingly cutting style.

My wife had met Cecil before the War, when he had been something of a mentor to her brother George Sawle, and it was after a visit to the Sawles' cottage in Harrow that he had written 'Two Acres', a poem that attained some celebrity in the war years, and after. I suspect she was a good deal dazzled by his energy and his profile, and as an ardent consumer of romantic verse she was surely impressed to meet a real live poet, dark-eyed and raven-haired. There are certainly signs that he was fond of her, though these should not be exaggerated; my brother was accustomed to admiration, and as a rule was gracious to those who provided it. He wrote his famous poem at her request for some memento in her visitors' book, but he had only known her at the time for two days. It amused me somewhat that Cecil, heir to three thousand acres, should have been best-known for his ode to a mere two. Very thoughtfully, he invited her to Corley once when her brother also was staying with us.

There followed various sarcasms about George's visits to the Valances.

He showed a keen interest in both house and estate. If he had the unintended air at times of an agent or bailiff, his preoccupations were no doubt largely intellectual. He and Cecil were sometimes absent for hours, returning with tales of what they had found in the labyrinthine cellars or secluded attics of the house, or with reports, which pleased my father, of the quality of the grazing or the woodsman-s.h.i.+p shown on the Corley farms.

Paul thought again about George and Cecil on the roof, the whole rich difficult range of unspoken testimony, in images and implications. Surely Dudley was hinting here at something he couldn't possibly have said outright?

Daphne, two or three years younger, was more open and at ease, and spoke her mind in a manner that sometimes startled my mother but habitually delighted me. She had grown up with two elder brothers of her own, and was used to their spoiling. I was thrown together with her by the somewhat exclusive nature of George and Cecil's pursuits, and our own relations were at first fraternal; it was clear that she idolized Cecil, but to me she was an amusingly artless companion, unaffected by the family view of me as, if not a black, then certainly a greyish sheep. She loved to talk, and her face lit up with amus.e.m.e.nt at the simplest pleasantries. To her Corley Court was less a matter for the social historian than a vision out of some old romance. Its inhuman aspects were part of its charm. The stained gla.s.s windows that kept out the light, the high ceilings that baffled all attempts at heating, the barely penetrable thickets of overladen tables, chairs and potted palms that filled the rooms, were invested with a kind of magic. 'I should like very much to live in a house like this,' she said, on the occasion of that first visit. Four years later she was married in the chapel at Corley, and in due course, if for a limited span, was herself the mistress of the house.

Paul decided hotels were hardly the best place to work. All around there was noise a late riser above had pulled the bath-plug and the waste fell with an unembarra.s.sed frothing and gargling sound through a pipe apparently inches from his desk; the maid had come in twice, even though check-out wasn't till eleven; baffled but unbeaten, she toiled in the hallway with the hoover or went up and down opening and slamming the doors; in a room immediately to his left, and previously unsuspected, some sort of business meeting had got under way, with periodic laughter and the rambling voice of a man addressing them, a completely meaningless phrase now and then discernible through the thin wall. Paul sat back with a yelp of frustration; yet he saw the scene had already a kind of anecdotal quality, and he wrote it up too in his diary, as a reminder of the biographer's difficult existence.

When he got back to Olga, just before two o'clock, he found the front door open and heard Wilfrid's voice coming from the kitchen, speaking more regularly and emphatically than usual. Even so, he couldn't make out at first what he was saying. He felt he'd chanced on something awkwardly private. There was a sense of possible crisis. Rather than ring the bell, Paul stepped into the hall and gripping his briefcase stood leaning forward with an apologetic expression. It dawned on him that Wilfrid was reading to his mother. ' "Ah hammer . . . dryers ever seen",' he seemed to say. For a dislocated second Paul couldn't place it; then of course he knew. Are Hamadryads ever seen / Between the dancing veils of green . . . ? He was reading 'Two Acres' for her, and she was making a grumbling noise or coming in on the words herself as if to say the reading was hardly necessary; it was a sort of briefing perhaps for her second day's interview, and Paul found something rea.s.suring in that and something oddly touching in the reversal of roles, son reading to mother. ' "Or pause, then take the hidden turn, The path amid-" ' ' "The path amid the hip-high fern",' Daphne came in. 'You don't read it at all well.'

'Perhaps you would rather I didn't?' said Wilfrid in his usual tone of dry forbearance.

'Poetry, I mean, you have no idea how to read poetry. It's not the football results . . .'

'Well I'm sorry . . .'

'The curfew tolls the knell of pa.s.sing day: one; The ploughman homeward plods his weary way: nil,' said Daphne, getting a bit carried away. 'When I'm gone, you should get a job on the telly.'

'Don't . . . talk like that,' said Wilfrid, and Paul, not seeing their faces, took a moment to realize it was not her mockery but the mention of her going that he was objecting to. And what indeed would he do then? Puzzled for a moment by his own muddled feelings of affection and irritation towards Daphne, Paul tiptoed back out again and rang the bell.

Exactly as yesterday, but with determined new warmth, Paul said to Wilfrid in the hall, 'And how is your mother?'

'I fear she didn't sleep at all well,' said Wilfrid, not meeting his eye; 'you might keep it . . . pretty short today.' Paul went into the sitting-room and set up the mike and looked over his notes with a clear sense they were blaming him for her bad night. But in fact when Daphne came through she seemed if anything rather more spry than yesterday. She made her way among the helpful obstacles of the room with the inward smile of an elderly person who knows they're not done yet. He felt something had happened in the interim; of course she would have been thinking, rea.s.sessing her position as she lay awake, and he would have to find out as he went along if the spryness was a sign of compliance or resistance.

'Rather a lovely day,' she said as she sat down; and then c.o.c.king her head to check Wilfrid was still in the kitchen making coffee, 'Has he been telling you about his popsy?'

'Oh well, I gathered . . .' Paul smiled distractedly as he checked the tape-recorder.

'I mean, he's sixty! He can't look after a lively young woman he can hardly look after me!'

'Perhaps she would look after him.'